You are so excited because your nonprofit is getting ready to do some strategic planning and you think you might — finally! — get some real strategic direction for your communications plan. Don’t hold your breath. While it’s fabulous that many nonprofits are recognizing the value of strategic communications plans, the sad fact is that too many are satisfied with a buzzword bingo card strung into a few...

Congratulations, you’ve got new email subscribers! Now what? Dump them in your normal communications stream without recognition or welcome? Nope! Welcome them – quickly, warmly, sincerely. The welcome email may be the single most important email you send. Welcome emails confirm permission and set expectations with the subscriber. Welcome emails are four times more likely to be opened, and five times more likely to get...

Repurposing your content is essential to your success. You don’t have enough time to create original content constantly, and your community needs to hear your messages and calls to action in clear and consistent ways over and over anyway. Repurposing content makes sense, and it works! I like simple rules. So I created five of them to help guide your repurposing strategy. To make them even easier to remember, they are all...

On more than a few occasions, I’ve told friends and family that the gift I most want on my birthday or Mother’s Day is to NOT be asked to make a decision. I make what feels like a million decisions in managing work and family, and it’s exhausting. This respite from my “decision fatigue” is a real gift. Your decisionmaking ability is like a muscle – when you use it too much, you get tired and your performance wanes. That’s when...

Yesterday I introduced you to some of the concepts from Donald Sull’s and Kathleen M. Eisenhardt’s Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World (Amazon). We looked at three kinds of simple rules that provide frameworks for making better decisions: Boundary Rules, Prioritizing Rules and Stopping Rules. Today, let’s look at three more, this time related to work processes, or how to do things better. They are...

In their book, Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World (Amazon), Donald Sull and Kathleen M. Eisenhardt define simple rules as “shortcut strategies that save time and effort by focusing our attention and simplifying the way we process information.” They help us simplify complex systems and decisions so that we can move more quickly through our daily lives at work and home. “Never go on a second date...